The Labyrinth collapsed on a Tuesday afternoon in August.
He felt it from the eastern woods — a massive structural failure in the divine geometry that had been sitting under the camp's property for centuries, the kind of collapse that did not merely end a thing but changed the shape of the land where it had been. Daedalus had died somewhere in there, and the Labyrinth, which was bound to his life, had gone with him.
The quest group came back, and with them Nico di Angelo, who had been underground doing things that had not been in the plan and which had added a significant weight to the summer's events. The Titan army had found the Labyrinth and used it and been stopped — not eliminated, but significantly disrupted. The camp was more battered than it had been at any point since Thalia's poisoning.
Kael was at the medical room for the first forty-eight hours after the return, running triage with Will and the Apollo cabin's full healing team. The Harmonic Healing had its first real test: seven people in the room simultaneously, various injuries from underground combat, and he played for four hours straight on the second day until his MANA was at the floor and his hands were stiff and the inflammation markers on three of the most critical patients had come down enough for Will to move them from critical to serious.
He slept for ten hours and went back the next morning.
On the fourth day, when the medical emergency had settled into sustained care rather than crisis, Percy came to find him. Percy looked the way Percy looked after something that had cost him significantly: not broken, not diminished, but the kind of tired that does not come from sleep deprivation but from the specific exhaustion of caring a great deal about an outcome and surviving it.
He sat next to Kael on the medical room's bench. For a while he did not speak. Then: 'Pan is gone.'
'I know,' Kael said. He had known this was the summer Pan's story would end — the god of the wild, fading for a century, whose last message had been delivered by Grover. He said it with the full weight of meaning it.
'Grover is — he's okay. He's sad in a way I don't know how to help with.'
'Some sadness is not something that can be helped from outside,' Kael said. 'It has to be carried until it becomes part of how someone stands rather than something they're fighting against. The best you can do is be present without requiring him to be less sad on your timeline.'
Percy looked at him. 'How do you know that?'
'Practice,' Kael said. He thought about Zoe's star. About Luke's letter. About the weight of knowing things before they happened and being unable to prevent all of them. 'Some of it is my situation. Some of it is just — paying attention to how it works.'
Percy was quiet for a moment. Then: 'Next summer. The big thing.'
'Yes.'
'You know how it goes.'
'I know a version of it,' Kael said carefully. 'But the versions I know are not fixed. They're more like — the best current estimate. Things that I know can change, change. What I'm certain of is the general shape. The Titan army reaches Manhattan. The Olympians are threatened. Percy makes a choice.'
'What choice?'
'I can't tell you the specific choice,' Kael said. 'Not because I'm withholding — because I think knowing would change how you approach it, and the way you approach it naturally is the way it needs to be approached.' He looked at Percy. 'What I can tell you is: trust yourself. When the moment comes, you will know what you know and you will do what you do and it will be right. Not because it's fated but because you will have earned the capacity to do it correctly.'
Percy processed this. He had, Kael thought, gotten considerably better over four years at sitting with partial information without pushing against the partialness. It was one of the ways he had grown. 'Okay,' he said. 'I trust you.'
'I know,' Kael said. 'That matters to me.'